Lewis - in the circumstances you describe I have to say that accelerating the building of civilisation would be the last thing on my mind. My immediate survival and the survival of those with me would be the most pressing concern. Only once that was accomplished could anyone start to think about the future and I do not believe that it could be done quickly anyway - it would probably be trial and error, little by little and also extremely hard work. And don't forget - to build a civilisation you need people to do it. A handful of survivors could not do that. They would need to breed and produce more people, who would then grow up and produce more people ad finitum until there were enough of us to consider ourselves some kind of civilisation. Even with all the technical knowledge in the world this process could not be speeded up so really, I don't think that it could be done as quickly as you would like to think. Mind you, that is not to say that the technical knowledge would be wasted - it would just mean that we could probably live in more comfort while we get to that point. And I am definitely in favour of comfort! What do you think?

Yes Jess, I think you're absolutely right. In such a marooning scenario your priorities will be for immediate survival, and a prerequisite for civilisation will be a larger population size. Given these, as the starting point for a thought experiment, what steps could you take over the generations to recover advanced technology as rapidly as possible? To what extent could you accelerate the progression from mud huts and subsistence farming to electricity, automobiles and antibiotics - how much faster than the ~10,000 years it took us first time around?